Space Station Crew Excited for 1st Private Spaceship Visit

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The three astronauts living on the International Space Station
are ready to usher in a new era at their orbiting home: the first
arrival of a privately built spacecraft.

The Hawthorne, Calif.-based commercial spaceflight company Space
Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, is preparing to launch
its
Dragon capsule toward the station May 7 on an unmanned
mission to deliver supplies and demonstrate its own abilities.
The flight is the Dragon capsule's maiden voyage for SpaceX under
a NASA program aimed at buying cargo delivery services from
private companies, now that the agency's space shuttles are
retired.

The three astronauts on the space station are vital to the
SpaceX
capsule's safe arrival; the job falls to them to use the space
station's robotic arm to grab the craft as it approaches (Dragon
does not carry the tools that would allow it to dock itself).

"It feels very good to be part of that and I look forward to it
very much," European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers, who
hails from the Netherlands, told the Associated Press Tuesday
(May 1) during an interview broadcast on NASA TV. "This is the
start of a real new era and I expect there's a lot more to come."

Kuipers and his crewmate Don Pettit of NASA will be the ones
manning the robotic arm, called the Canadarm. The two spacemen
have been using software, as well as practice runs with the real
arm, to get ready for the event. [ Photos:
Dragon, SpaceX's Private Spaceship ]

"We were practicing a bit this morning," Pettit said. "We do it
over and over and over again. We are getting prepared for our
visitor next week."

Dragon is slated to launch next week aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9
booster rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
It will spend about three days catching up to the space
laboratory in orbit and undergoing checkouts, and then will be
pulled in to make a docking with the station. The capsule will
carry food, clothing, supplies and scientific equipment for the
astronauts, though none of it is critical, since this mission is
officially a test flight.

However, NASA officials are hoping things go smoothly to pave the
way for a more regular delivery service by SpaceX, as well as
another
NASA-contracted company, Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles,
Va. Orbital is due to fly its Cygnus spacecraft on a first
demonstration flight later this year.

Overall, NASA has contracted SpaceX to fly 12 more cargo delivery
flights for a total of $1.6 billion. Orbital has received an
order for eight flights for $1.9 billion.

Pettit compared this new commercial-government partnership to
what happened with forts in the Old West. While the U.S.
government sponsored the forts and defined the mission,
commercial outfitters ran the wagon trains that supplied the
forts.

"Now government-run agencies like NASA can concentrate on the
frontier aspect of being in space," Pettit said. "They can define
what we're doing and then we can have the commercial entities
supply us the gods and services we need in order to do the
mission."